


give up the ghost

by wreckageofstars



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Family, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I think this is the TARDIS trying in vain to give everyone therapy tbh, One-Shot, Prompt Fill, Thirteen Fanzine (Doctor Who), Various Old Companions, s12 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:39:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24510193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreckageofstars/pseuds/wreckageofstars
Summary: The Doctor retreats. Other things move in to fill the space.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan, Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair
Comments: 12
Kudos: 109





	give up the ghost

—

At night, she wanders.

She must think the rest of them don’t notice, but Yaz sleeps lightly anyway, these days. The tread of her feet down the corridors is hard to miss. Sometimes it goes on for hours, restless pacing without end. There are other sounds, too; circuits snapping and sparking, the clank of tools against unyielding metal, the occasional bout of alien cursing; sometimes even—worryingly—the wheeze and moan of the ship materialising, sent whispering down the hall to her ears. Yaz knows she’d never disturb them if she had a choice, but she hears it all the same, even when by all rights the noise should be far away. It’s sentimental and silly and maybe not even right, but all she can think of is that it must be the TARDIS, like a tug on her sleeve. _Notice this_ , like a whisper. _Notice this, please_.

She’s noticed. They all have. The Doctor doesn’t sleep anymore.

—

“It ain’t right,” Graham mutters into his tea, where they’re gathered on the steps. It’s been days since the spa, and maybe even weeks since they’d last set foot on Earth. Well—

Yaz swallows harshly, fingers whitening over her own mug. Earth as they knew it, anyway.

Time passes in fits and starts on the TARDIS, sometimes slow like treacle, sometimes quick as a blink. Quick as a blink is more common, lately. They jump from one adventure to the next like the Doctor’s going down a list, and when they’re not outside, she’s—

Ryan shudders at the sound of a wrench being thrown from the other side of the console, hidden from view. They wait for the inevitable cursing that follows. The console is less a console and more a terrifying conglomeration of naked wires and stripped-down circuits, these days. Whenever they return to the TARDIS, that’s what she sets herself to, hair pulled back, tools left sprawled on the floor, even between excursions.

“Trying to track down a fault,” she’d told them days ago, grease smeared across one cheek already. The line of her mouth had been too tense to be a proper smile. “Should make the landings smoother. If I can find it.”

Muffled swearing hits their ears, finally. She hasn’t found it.

No one replies to Graham’s muttered comment. There’s no need, or maybe there’s no point. They talk amongst themselves, when they’re alone—more and more, lately—or when they’re sure she’s not listening, but—

Yaz sips at lukewarm tea, morose. It’s a bad habit they’ve got, she’s noticed. Of leaving things unspoken, when they really shouldn’t be.

“It’s got to stop sometime,” is all Ryan whispers, eventually.

—

It doesn’t.

—

‘Mardy’ doesn’t even begin to cover it, not any longer, but the Doctor won’t admit to any of it. Her mood is fine, everything is fine, oh, look, Yaz, wouldn’t you like to go see the Seventeen Spires of Splig, they’re made of pure diamond—and on, and on, and on. She deflects and defers and retreats at every turn, and the twist of her mouth gets tighter every time.Their adventures have a rushed, perfunctory air now, like she’s spun a wheel or stuck her finger randomly into the telephone book of the universe. They’re always on the move, forward, forward, forward, on to the next one, and it’s only when things go a bit wrong that Yaz thinks she can see a bit of the person her friend had used to be. There’s the odd flash of an exhilarated grin when they’re running, a gleam in her eye when she has to fix something, build something, explain something. A hint of that warmth, that compassion, when they put things to rights. But the slow bits, the waiting bits, the wandering bits are all an agony—and not just for her. She snaps at them, when they get too close. Withdraws, when they wander too far. She drags them along behind her like she’s running out of time, until they’re out of breath and out of patience—and that’s the flip side, Yaz has realized. The other side of the coin. It’s all fast fast fast, until it’s not. When it’s not, she leaves them to their own devices, leaves them to meander and lounge around alien tourist traps, to trip and tiptoe around the TARDIS while she curses at the console.

Whatever she’s doing, it’s not repairs. None of them have worked up the courage to ask what it _really_ is, and maybe that’s part of the problem, but in the meantime—the flip side. The waiting, wandering agony.

She’s set the ship orbiting a nebula, in the wake of their brief foray into vintage New York. Yaz is brave enough that she sometimes comes and sits with her cup of tea, legs swinging into empty space, the impossible lurking just beyond. The incredibly irritable lurking just behind. Yaz knows intellectually that the Doctor genuinely enjoys their company, which is sometimes the only thing that keeps her from dunking her tea out into the nebula and traipsing back into the depths of the TARDIS, when the silent tension spreads too far. Things had felt so— _normal_ , when they’d been running from giant spiders and saving the day, but there had been such an edge to that final confrontation. Something that had spoilt the milk, turned the Doctor sour again. Yaz is certain that if she can only put her finger on exactly what had been the catalyst, the rest will all fall into place, but—

She glances away from the nebula, into the depths of the liquid swirling gently in her cup. It’s all about as clear as the milk in her tea. In the meantime, tools clatter and bang behind her, and the universe spirals out in front, beckoning. The open doors are an afterthought, she knows. Right now, the Doctor can’t even see.

“You’re right,” says a voice to her left, _blindingly_ Scottish. “She’s not even looking. So why are you here?”

Lukewarm tea spills over onto her fingers as she jumps. Her eyes fix on miles of leg that eventually, excruciatingly, lead up to a face. The red-head gazing down at her raises an eyebrow.

“What?” the red-head demands. “Look at you, in your—sensible trainers. Listen, you might not know it, but for a while, being able to run in a mini-skirt was sort of a prerequisite for boarding, here.”

In the absence of any words that might possibly make sense of this impossibly strange situation, Yaz only gapes.

The red-head seems to take this as cue to make herself comfortable. “I mean,” she admits, fixing her ridiculously long legs to match Yaz’s own, set swinging off the edge of the floor, “I don’t know what nebula this is, to be fair. I don’t always listen when the Doctor talks, a lot of it is just—it’s just noise. But I do know,” and her eyes go dreamy and a little bit sad, “that a nebula is a cloud of dust and gas. They form out of the explosions that happen when stars die, or—sometimes, when they’re born. We could be looking at something being destroyed, or something being created.”

“Does that make it the same?” Yaz wonders.

“Sometimes,” the girl whispers.

In the brief instant that Yaz turns her gaze to the stars, the girl wisps away like she was never there. But her voice lingers, just for a moment, just for a breath.

“It’s all just gravity,” she says softly. “It’s all just not letting go.”

—

There’s a boy watching the Doctor, watching the console like she’s expecting it to bite her. Which it might do, Graham admits. Even after all this time, the TARDIS can still surprise him.

The extra guests, for instance. Graham clears his throat, ponders only mildly the possibility that he’s finally gone off his nut. It’s been that sort of week. Well. It’s _always_ that sort of week.

“Er,” he says. The Doctor doesn’t notice him. She lives in her own head, these days.

The boy turns to him, dwarfed by the arch at the top of the stairs, cast in eerie light by the clouds of dust and gas through the open doors behind. There’s a metal star clutched in his small hand, so tightly that the gesture’s drawn blood. There’s a paleness to him that raises the hair on the back of Graham’s neck.

“I was right,” the boy says quietly. “In the end, I was right.”

“Right about what?” Graham wonders, but the boy’s attention strays quickly to the open doors.

“It’s all maths, out there. Life and death, it’s all just numbers.”

Graham frowns. “Is it?”

The boy shifts uncomfortably at the suggestion of his disapproval. “I think I’d know,” he insists. But his gaze strays to the Doctor, again, up to her elbows in cables, buried. Shoulders hunched. “I could help her, you know.”

“Could you?” Graham’s stomach twists with the question. Someone ought to. Someone with hands and a heart that don’t fumble.

The boy’s face falls. “She never let me.”

Graham’s lips wince into a smile. “Know the feeling, son.” He glances down to the two mugs of tea in his hands, half-anxious. “But we’ve still got to try, don’t we.”

“She never let me,” the boy says again, and his voice is a whisper that travels all the way down the back of Graham’s neck.

When he looks up, there’s only empty air. The boy’s voice still carries.

“Not until the very end.”

—

The problem is, Ryan figures, even when they say all the right things and do all the right things, the Doctor never quite believes them. The problem then is that the Doctor wants them to _believe_ that she believes them, and so then she says all the right things and dashes off to do the right things—the Doctor-y things, the fun things, the dangerous things—and at the end of it all—

Well, they’re three days parked around a dying star, and it’s all just words, isn’t it. For a moment, he’d let himself believe they’d been a genuine comfort. He’d let himself believe that the words they’d said had finally been the right ones. He’d let himself believe that maybe everything would go back to normal, that whatever happened in Gloucester had been soothed by whatever they’d managed to get across, but in the days since, she’s fizzled out again. Set them drifting and buried herself, searching for the one bloke in the entire universe Ryan could stand to never see again. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t _want_ to get it.

Also, he’s bored out of his mind. Bored out of his mind, but it’s a small thing, and admitting to it seems shameful, somehow. How can you run out of things to do, on a ship that goes on forever? It’s just—

He turns the corner, heading to where his room was this morning. It’s just, it’s not as fun without the Doctor, to show him the hidden corners and the trick doors and to tell him seventy-five more facts about the spider plant growing in the arboretum than he ever wanted to know. It’s not as fun, without her babbling in his ear, without her pulling him up ladders. The ship is _hers_ , after all. Without her there, it’s just sort of—

—empty.

There’s a blonde in a hoodie sprawled on his bed, when he opens the door. He yelps. She smiles.

“Hello,” she says, over a grin. “Look at you, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Oh, please don’t be a ghost,” he begs.

“I’m not a ghost,” she promises. “Just a girl. Or I was, probably.”

Ryan moans and closes the door, and then his eyes. Graham’s right. All those late nights and energy drinks and he’s finally, finally gone off his nut. “That’s not helping.”

“Isn’t it?” Her feet make no sound, but he can feel her coming closer, like a static in the air. “Hard to help people, when they don’t wanna be helped.”

He opens his eyes. The girl’s are warm and brown.

“Yeah,” he strangles out in agreement, some of the fear slowly leaking away. “Yeah, that’s true.”

She laughs, delighted. Big smile. Sunny. He likes her, suddenly. “You’re alright, aren’t you?”

“Er,” he says. “Thanks. I think.”

She leaves her warm gaze on him for a moment, watching. She’s not quite solid, almost see-through. Feet with no sound, body with no substance. But those eyes have a weight, still.

“My very first trip,” she says finally, “she took me to the end of the world.”

The hair on the back of his neck raises. “Why?” he asks. _She only took us on accident_.

“I think,” the girl says, and her eyes grow distant, “she wanted me to know what it felt like. To watch it all burn. To see it all destroyed, and then to move on. To give it up.”

Ryan frowns. “Why would you wanna give it up?”

“To move forwards,” the girl whispers. “Or backwards.” For the briefest moment, he swears her eyes shine gold. “Time happens all at once, you know. Everything’s bein’ created and destroyed in the same instant.”

He frowns harder. He blinks, and in the space between, she vanishes.

“Why are you at the end of the world, Ryan?” she whispers.

—

She hasn’t parked them at the end of the world, but the dying star is probably just as bad, really.

“Yaz said they could be stars being born, too, nebulas,” he tries, on the fourth day. The Doctor deigns to extract herself briefly from the console to look at him. She pushes her goggles up until her hair sticks out, and frowns.

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Galactic nurseries. Or one hell of a funeral. You get the full gamut, with nebulas.” Her hand goes to push the goggles down again, and he’s losing her, losing her—

“Er,” he tries again. “It’s just—it’s just it’s a bit sad, isn’t it?”

She blinks at him. He’s already lost her, hasn’t he. “Why would it be sad?” she asks, but her attention’s drifted from the console, and she wrenches off her goggles and comes to join him at the open doors. Eerie light catches her face. It’s the first time he’s seen her up close in days. It’s not exactly an encouraging sight. Out from under their gazes, she’s become hollowed out. Pale.

He frowns out at the clouds of dust and gas, sucked in, sprawled. It’s the most beautiful death rattle he’s ever seen. “Big star goin’ out,” he says. “I dunno, they live for ages, don’t they? They have a spot in the sky for what feels like forever, until—until one day they don’t.”

“I suppose,” she says, settling wearily onto the ground so her legs can swing—and his gut twists, because when is she ever weary, when is she ever still? When had he stopped noticing? “But time isn’t a strictly linear progression, it’s—it’s a big ball of—oh, that’s a bit rubbish.” She leans against the doorframe, gazing out into the universe. “Time doesn’t start or stop. It sort of—happens all at once. This star is dying, but it’s also being born. We could hop back to any point of its existence and see it whole and alive. So even when it’s gone, it won’t—”

Her breath catches.

“It won’t stop,” she says. “It’ll always be there.”

“Doctor,” Ryan says. His legs swing out into empty, impossible air. “Where are we?”

She smiles in the eerie light. He’s lost her.

“Nowhere important,” she breathes.

—

The boy doesn’t return. Graham worries in quiet moments—in the long, quiet moment their life’s become, this week—that it’s something he should mention to the Doctor, but it’s hard to grab her attention these days. Well. And he’s slightly worried the answer he’s gonna get will sound something like ‘oh, didn’t you know the TARDIS is haunted, Graham?’ which might finally send him reeling over the edge.

He still worries, though. He still wonders. But when he wanders, he can’t find any trace of the boy, not in the rooms, not in the library. No trace. No trace of much of anything from before them, if he’s honest. It’s funny, but he’s always gotten the sense that for all her warmth, the Doc isn’t much for sentimentality. His forays into the TARDIS’ depths seem to prove it. What, then, he wonders, is she hanging onto? It’s clearly something.

“Are you lost?” a voice whispers, like it might be the part of some unfinished joke. Graham reels, and the fronds of a spidery plant hit him in the face. He’s stumbled into the arboretum, which tends to happen lately if he gets distracted while he’s wandering. “It’s alright, if you are.”

“I’m not lost,” he insists. Mostly, it’s true. Partly, it’s very untrue, because he’s always a bit lost, in the bowels of the TARDIS. How can you be anything but lost, when the corridors change on a whim?

“I used to get lost all the time.” It’s not the boy, this time. The voice belongs to a girl with hair like his mother’s, dressed in a white gown like his grandmother’s. Altogether, he surmises, a confusing look. “And she’d get so cross, but she wasn’t, really.”

“You’re from a long time ago,” Graham breathes. “Aren’t you.”

The girl’s thin eyebrows raise. “Oh? _Oh_ , the gown.” She twirls. “Borrowed, I’m afraid. It’s from long before my time. I thought she’d like it, but the reception was a bit poor, honestly.” The girl leans in, big sad eyes. A blink, and she’s dressed in striped dungarees instead. They match her half-hearted perm better. “She doesn’t like to look back.”

“No,” Graham agrees. “She don’t.”

“But sometimes the reminder is important,” the girl whispers. “Don’t you think?” She smiles gently. Graham likes her, suddenly. The deliberate, stubborn cheerfulness of her. “She walks in eternity, but,” and when he blinks she wisps away like she was never there. Her voice lingers like an afterthought.

“Eternity is very long, when you’re cursed to see it all.”

—

He keeps wandering, after that. The TARDIS is full of boating lakes and bowling alleys and junk rooms, but when he lets himself be guided along, it isn’t too hard to get to where he wants, usually.

It’s in one of the junk rooms that he finds what he’s looking for, laying in a drawer, on top of a crumpled, handwritten essay. _A-_ , he reads, scrawled in red ink. _Took points off for excellent but meandering anecdote about the squid_. In smaller print, like a reluctant afterthought: _Well done_.

He takes the star and leaves the essay. There’s a rawness to it. Some things seem too precious to touch.

“Good thinking,” he hears, and it’s a new voice, a kind voice. Out of the corner of his eye, a girl with a hole in her chest gazes at him serenely. The hair on the back of his neck raises.

“Some things,” she says gently, fading away, “they’re still too new.”

—

She’s coated in a layer of fine red dust, when he finds her. He doesn’t know what it means, beyond the fact that she’s gone and taken the TARDIS somewhere else while they were sleeping. Parked them back in front of that wheezing, dying star, doors open like they’d never left, but it’s a poor lie. He should really stop letting them slide.

“Doc,” he tries.

She’s underneath the console today, wires sprawled out behind her. At the sound of his voice, she startles, and the clang of her head hitting the console’s underside echoes. He winces.

“Graham,” she wheezes, extracting herself gingerly. The goggles on the top of her head have cracked. She removes them, upper lip curling in irritation. “Was there something you wanted?”

“Er,” he says. “Well, no. Not exactly.”

She nods, eyebrows raised. Eyes already wandering. Only half listening, only half caring. The goggles drop absently to the floor.

“Repairs are taking a while,” he ventures finally. “That’s all.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, you know how it is. Maintenance. Correspondence about the maintenance, it’s all—”

“You’re looking for him, still,” Graham interrupts.

A beat.

“Yeah,” she admits flatly, avoiding his gaze. “Sorry.”

“Don’t have to apologize,” he says. “Only—”

 _Is everything alright?_ Only he knows the answer, doesn’t he. He eyes the dust still caught in her hair. Her sunburnt nose. The dust and gas, gleaming in through the open doors.

“I found something,” he says, taking the plunge, reaching into his pocket. “Or—or I didn’t find it, really, I think the TARDIS brought me to it.”

For the first time in days, her eyes brighten with something like interest. The interest dulls to suspicion, and then, when she finally catches sight of what’s in his hand, to resignation.

“Why would you bring that up?” she wonders, tossing a glare at the ceiling, hands moving to her hips. Remorse darting between the reeds of her eyes, a quick, dark thing.

He holds it out to her. She takes it gingerly, like it might bite. No, he thinks, a second later. Like it might break.

“What is it, Doc?”

“It’s a badge for mathematical excellence.” She breathes out through her nose. “Saved me from a Cyberman, once.”

Which illuminates very little, but he thinks he can feel some of the pieces falling together. He thinks of the boy, pale and dark. He thinks of the girl with the hole in her chest.

“Had it for too long,” she whispers. “Where was it?”

“Just in a drawer,” he tells her, and her face twists.

“Shut away in the dark,” she mutters, and strides to the open door. “He’d have hated that. Really,” she says softly, “I should have put it on the fridge or something.” The twist of her face softens into a smile. Old. “Bit late, now.”

Graham almost moves to stop her, as she releases it into open space, but in the next moment it catches the eerie light, and he stills. They watch it gleam, as it drifts away slowly. Pulled into the orbit of a decaying star. It’s not quite letting go, Graham thinks, but can’t put his finger on why.

Eventually, the Doctor sits, and he does too, their legs swinging into empty air. They watch it drift further, further, like a bottle pulled out to sea.

“Doc,” Graham says quietly. “Where are we?”

She doesn’t answer. When he shifts to glance at her, she’s fast asleep, leaning against the door frame. Starlight framing her face. It’s not quite peaceful.

Still. He lets her be. He’ll take what he can get, these days.

“Thank you,” he whispers, into open space before him, empty air behind him. The TARDIS creaks in what might be acknowledgement.

—

“You don’t always have to do what she says, you know.”

Yaz startles. The electric kettle in the TARDIS kitchen burbles away its last breaths, giving up with a tiny click. When she turns, tea-less, there’s a girl in a smart leather jacket across from her. Dark, arms crossed, kind eyes.

“Ryan was right,” Yaz breathes, despite herself. “The ship is haunted.” She frowns. “Why wasn’t it haunted before?”

“Maybe it didn’t need to be,” the girl says.

“That don’t make any sense.”

“Does anything on this ship make any sense?”

“Fair,” Yaz agrees. She wonders briefly if she should offer the ghost a cuppa. Wonders briefly if she’s going mad, if this is something she should be saying something about, but—

An echoing clang makes its way to her ears from the console room. A week, they’ve been parked. The girl closes her eyes, mouth flattening with pity.

“I thought I was never gonna leave, you know,” she says quietly. “I thought I would stay forever, but—I didn’t need to, in the end. I discovered I was worth something on my own.”

“I never want to leave,” Yaz says. “I’m here, no matter what.”

The ghost smiles sadly at her. For a moment, it reminds her of that alley in Hong Kong, soaked in fear and resignation. “I know. But I meant what I said. You don’t always have to do what she says. She doesn’t always know best.”

“Oh, I know,” Yaz counters. “Believe me. I’m—I’m trying.”

The girl only gazes back at her, still smiling.

“Why are you still here?” she asks. And when Yaz blinks, frowns, she’s gone in the space between like she was never there. “It’s only gravity.”

—

At night, she wanders. She must still think they don’t notice, but Yaz sleeps lightly, and the sounds still make it to her ears, like a tug on her sleeve.

 _Notice this_ , something whispers.

Yaz jolts awake.

Singing metal echoes down the corridor, muffled shouts and sparks and bangs. A tantrum, in the dead of night. There’s a hand stroking her hair, gentle. A small brunette, dark eyes gleaming in the gloom, looms above her.

“There’s nothing I can do,” she whispers.

Yaz shakes her head against the pillow. “Nor me,” she whispers back. “I’ve tried.”

The ghost takes away her hand.“But you could try again. You have hands and a heart.”

“Don’t you?” Yaz asks.

“Not a beating one.”

Alone, in the dark, Yaz shudders. “Who are you? All of you?”

“Please,” the ghost says. “Please, just look. Look and _see_.”

She was raised to respect the dead. Yaz stumbles out of bed, hand trailing the wall of the corridor, following the clank of tools and the snap of sparks and the wordless cries. The ghost of the girl follows, just behind.

As Yaz walks, she multiplies. One girl becomes two, becomes three, becomes four, becomes _many_. Faces she’s never seen before, shimmering, people of all sorts. Most human, some not.

The red-head had been right, though, she thinks absently. There are _quite_ a lot of mini-skirts.

“Time happens all at once,” a different red-head tells her kindly, when she stops and stares. “We’re gone, but we’re not. We keep living, in here. In memory banks and around the corners.”

“Can she see you?” Yaz whispers.

“We’d hurt more than we’d help,” says a man in a kilt.

A small blonde in a patch-covered jacket stares at her plaintively. “Go on, then. Please,” she says. “You can do what we can’t.”

They fade from her as she approaches the top of the stairs. For a moment, she’s legion.

In the next, it’s only her.

The console is a wreck. Not a work-in-progress wreck, like it’s been the past week, messy but deliberate. This is wires pulled and plugs ripped out and hard work undone. A bit obscene. The TARDIS pulses dark and blue, upset. Creaks and moans, like heavy breaths.

Yaz joins her at the open doors, stares out into the eerie light. Lets her legs dangle into everything and nothing.

“Hey,” she says quietly.

The Doctor’s legs are dangling too. Her hands are bleeding in her lap. “Hey,” she says, finally.

Yaz waits. None of them get anywhere by asking questions, these days. She waits, and she doesn’t leave, and the dying, decaying star in front of them glints in shards of matter and clouds of dust and gas.

“I can’t find him,” the Doctor admits, eventually. Her eyes stay fixed on the beautiful carnage.

“I know,” Yaz says, and they sit, and they watch. The top of a mountain, the edge of a bridge. Every instinct screaming that she should be holding on tightly, wrestling them both away from the fall, but—but they’re both just watching.

Eventually, there’s the tread of solid footsteps behind them, and she twists her neck to see Ryan and Graham, wrapped in robes and hoodies. Graham’s trailing a blanket behind him, a thermos and four mugs wrapped carefully in his hands.

“Go on, then,” he says quietly, and they shove over to make room. It’s cramped, the four of them squished together in the doorway, but they tilt and arrange until everyone’s legs are free to swing, until everyone’s bathed in starlight. It only seems right.

Graham tuts at the Doctor hands and frets until she takes a corner of the blanket. He takes a mile and shoves a mug of tea into her hands as well, and for a while, they all sit in companionable silence, watching something die.

“Is it sad, “ Yaz asks, “or is it beautiful?”

“It’s just gravity,” the Doctor says.

 _Doctor_ , Yaz doesn’t ask. _Why are we here?_

“I think I see,” she says instead. And the night drags on, and the thermos gets emptied, and Ryan spills, once, and they watch the liquid float away from them, sucked into orbit, consumed. They hunt with their eyes for the metal star they’d set free. They fall asleep, one by one by one, lit by eerie light and one hell of a funeral.

It’s just gravity, Yaz thinks, as she drifts off. It’s all just not letting go.

“Doctor,” she whispers. They’re both nearly asleep. It’s not very comfortable, all of them crammed into the doorway, but if this is what it takes, then she’ll do it again and again. Night after night, if she has to. But— “In the morning,” she says quietly. “I think we should go.”

The Doctor looks at her, half-lidded. Empty mug in her lap, in her scraped and bloodied hands. She smiles, and it’s a real and ragged thing. Yaz wonders if she knows how many ghosts are soaked into the walls. If she knows how much they care, still.

If it’s better that she doesn’t. Maybe the past is better left behind, sometimes.

“Yeah,” she agrees softly. “We’ve been here long enough.”

**Author's Note:**

> hmmm long time no see! In case y'all didn't know, to celebrate the release of Vol. II of the Unofficial Thirteenth Doctor Fanzine, we're throwing a prompt week, all of the deets (of the prompts and the zine!) which can be found on our tumblr @thirteenfanzine. We'd love for you to participate! 
> 
> anyway, this was a fill for today's prompt 'haunted', and there's way more to come! We have some truly great prompts coming up and I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with.
> 
> In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed, thank you for reading, and I'd love to know what you thought!


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